Our commitment to Microsoft antimalware

We are fully committed to protecting our consumer and business customers from malware. Our strong solutions provide the comprehensive defense needed against malicious code and attacks. Our support of antimalware partners helps in building a strong and diverse ecosystem to fight malware.

Over the past year, we’ve continued to make investments in our protection technologies:

We’ve created new methods to identify emerging threats earlier and defend against them faster. Although around 80 percent of the malware our customers encounter are known or proactively blocked threats, new threats emerge every day. We’ve developed early warning telemetry and faster signature delivery systems to respond to these threats.

We’ve focused our resources on activities that directly contribute to customer protection. We exist to serve and protect our customers, so our research and response efforts focus on real threats that affect customers. Today millions of customers have voluntarily opted to let their computers share telemetry data with us on encountered threats, helping us identify and prioritize new malware files. If you are interested in learning more about our approach, I encourage you to read my previous blog and check out this paper which details our outcomes. Our public monthly report shows our trends and the progress we’re seeing.

We share our telemetry and samples with the industry to collectively make all of us stronger against our true adversaries – the malware writers. Our commitment to collaboration and sharing programs for antivirus (AV) partners and AV testers is stronger than ever. Through these programs, we encourage the ecosystem to address real world threats that impact all customers.

The end result is that, over the past year, our investments have increased the protection quality we deliver to our customers. As of the middle of 2013, we’ve increased our protection quality – that means less incorrect detections and less misses – by a significant rate since we first started measuring these metrics in the last quarter of 2011.

We are proud of the protection capabilities we provide for well over 150 million computers worldwide with our real-time antimalware products. We believe in Microsoft antimalware products and strongly recommend them to our customers, to our friends, and to our families.